"They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they wanted to."

A slang term for the hordes of standard-issue, disposable bad guys whom The Heromowsdown with impunity. Deadly, competent, loyal, abundant... pick any two.

Also called "baddies", "goons", "scrubs", "drones", "small fry", "flunkies", "pawns", "toadies", "grunts", "minions", "lackeys", "underlings", "henchpersons", and "cannon fodder". In Japanese videogame jargon, they're known as "zako" or "small fry". The actual term "mook" presumably comes from Hong Kong Cinema, and takes its name from the mook jong, the wooden training dummies used in Wing Chun, whose only function is to get hit. In Hong Kong movie circles, they're often called "three-hit men," in reference to how many hits it takes to put them down, though the actual number of hits varies.

It's a thankless job, to be sure, but somebody's gotta do it. Enter the humble mook.

Mooks play an important role, as without someone to fight on a constant basis, an action movie/show/game would have a lot less action. If every single minion your hero ever runs into has a personality, then the pacing of the show would slow to a crawl and Quirky Miniboss Squad, The Dragon, and the Big Bad would not feel as unique in comparison. Thus, mooks serve as Filler and a backdrop to the truly climactic moments of an action franchise while also ensuring that in-between things are kept lively. In Video Games, they may also double as a ready source of Experience Points, gold, and recovery items for the player.

Except where noted in some of the subcategories, it is generally considered "bad form" for mooks to be given any sort of detailed backstory or personality (beyond broad strokes). Put another way, for the purposes of heroes continuing to be seen as heroes, and to avoid a major mood swing, mooks generally have no girl/boyfriends, children, parents, grandparents; they don't belong to church groups or non-profits that might miss them; they don't spend part of their day looking forward to what's on TV tonight (never to see the show because they're about to die), and they generally die quick, semi-painless deaths (blood and gore optional). Mooks are rarely female, and if they are, they generally don't fall into the "gorgeous" category because you don't want the viewer/reader to become attached to a character the hero is about to kill (The Spy Who Loved Me is a noted example where this rule is broken, and 35 years later James Bond fans still criticize the decision to have Bond murder Caroline Munro's helicopter-flying babe). There are, of course, exceptions, either to make a Mood Whiplash and ponder about the nature of violence, establish the protagonist as a ruthless Anti-Hero, or briefly acknowledge that the mooks have lives and personal affairs but they're so trite and cliche that they deserve no sympathy anyway.

Not to be mistaken with a certain racial slur, or the tentacled aliens from the MOTHER series (although they themselves qualify), or the purple bird-like creature from Princess Comet (although he is also a mook in this sense).

In Video Games, mooks tend to be slightly more powerful, and able to at least hurt the hero, if not kill him a few times. However, 9 times out of 10, the hero has a Healing Factor (more often objects used to heal than spontaneous healing) while the mooks stay hurt forever. Also, while the hero can restart if he/she dies, the mooks (usually) only die once per level, and when the level is restarted, they usually do the exact same thing they did before.

Armies of mooks are not always but usually overwhelmingly male. Typically, killing or harming even one nameless female tends to twist an audience's sympathies differently than the effect of the same to a male. As your protagonist escapes the fortress of doom, you don't want the audience worrying about the mooks being taken out or hurt. In video games however, all-male mook armies are usually there for an entirely pragmatic reason, since including random female enemies would be requiring constructing entirely new character models for characters the player won't interact with outside of killing them.

If the mooks also provide romantic services, this may overlap with Paid Harem.

When supposedly elite fighters in large number are less competent together than a man alone, it's Conservation of Ninjutsu.

Note #1: With respect to media (particularly anime), a "mook" can also refer to a Japanese publication which is a hybrid of a magazine and a book.

Note #2: It's also a mostly obsolete racial slur against Italians, so use with caution.

Example subpages:

Vs. System has army characters that are generally mooks given they can get killed off quickly and lack uniqueness because you can only have 1 copy of non-Army characters like Spider-Man on the field; army characters are replaceable. Some examples are S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, Doom Bots, and Sentinels. Also, army characters do not have any restriction whatsoever in deck construction, whereas any other card is restricted to 4 copies (at most).

Magic: The Gathering has creature tokens, which are creatures who aren't even worth having their own card. By default, creature tokens' names are also their creature type, and if they leave play they simply cease to exist. They rarely have abilities, and those they do have are typically keyword abilities ("Flying," versus, "Any creature able to block this creature must do so."). They are also typically created in large numbers, either via a one shot deal creating two or more, or by a repeatable effect squeezing out one each turn. Creature tokens didn't have any sort of official representation until Magic Online needed some standardized way to represent them, and then they weren't printed in paper for years afterward.

Each Color has their own flavor of Mooks: Green has Saprolings (it used to be squirrels), Black has Zombies, Red has Goblins, White has Soldiers, while Blue has whatever is assigned as Blue creatures in the settings. Green is the biggest offender when it comes to spawning endless hordes of Mooks.

Super Munchkin has the "Wimpy Thugs", "More Wimpy Thugs" and "Still more Wimpy Thugs" monsters. "3,872 Orks" from the original game might count since they are the only monster going in hordes.

Sentinels of the Multiverse features decks for the villains that summon mooks to help the villain do their dirty work. Depending on who the players are fighting against, the number of mooks in the deck vary from few in number to half of the deck. Villains who rely on theirs mooks as a part of their deck's strategy include Baron Blade, Citizen Dawn, Grand Warlord Voss, the Dreamer, Omnitron, La Captian, the Chairman, the Matriarch, and Gloomweaver.

Friendship Is Magical Girls: The Infestation, a swarm of cockroach-like Changelings, are introduced as just another Monster of the Week during the Magic Arc. When they return during the Loyalty Arc, however, the MotW format has mostly been dropped, at which point they're repurposed by Eskarrg to serve this role, due to their numbers. He actually refers to them as "cannon fodder" at one point.

Lots of the stuff that gets summoned in Destroy The Godmodder falls squarely into this category. Sometimes with entire armies getting wiped out in one shot by relatively weak entities.

Web Original

In the Whateley Universe, the main characters get to leave their Super Hero School Whateley Academy and travel into Boston for the day... only to face The Necromancer and his homicidal Quirky Miniboss Squad, along with a couple hundred mooks who are nameless and somewhat faceless. The Necromancer has lived up to his name by animating hundreds of corpses, and Phase has to fight them in the sewers underneath Boston. Only she doesn't have a flashlight.

Leading to one of the funnier but more horrific sequences. Phase is worried about getting zombie gunk over her/him, and is informed s/he's probably okay. Just... "make sure to get cremated when you die."

Other

David Foster Wallace, in his 1998 essay on the porn industry "Big Red Son", notes that "mook" is industry jargon for the paying customers of porn. Whether it comes from the Hong Kong movie term or is a corruption of "mark" he doesn't say.

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